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  • Association of Pacific Coast Geographers Annual Meeting October 21–24, 2015 Palm Springs, CaliforniaAbstracts for Oral Presentations and Posters

Oral Presentation Abstracts

Stuart Aitken, saitken@mail.sdsu.edu, San Diego State University. Young People’s Emotional Geographies, Spatial Rights, and Mobilities in the Context of Erasure. The case of Slovenia’s erased minority populations is raised as one of the worst human rights abuses in contemporary Europe. With this paper I discuss the curtailment of minority young people’s spatial rights in the face of the transformation of Slovenia away from state socialism and toward seemingly free and open neoliberal statehood. I highlight the privations and struggles of Izbrisani (“Erased”) youth from the mid-1990s to the present day around issues of mobility, migration, transnationalism, and citizenship using data from the Ljubljana Peace Institute, and interviews and other data that I collected beginning in 2014 and continuing today. The paper is contextualized theoretically around issues of spatial rights, new mobilities, and more-general emotional geographies of erasure, and some parallels are drawn between the Slovenian context and the contexts of young people elsewhere.

James Allen, james.allen@csun.edu, California State University, Northridge; and Eugene Turner, eugene.turner@csun.edu, California State University, Northridge. The Changing Ethnic Quilt of Southern California. We have updated an online form in our 1997 book, The Ethnic Quilt. The maps show the distribution of thirty-four ethnic groups in 2010 and changes between 1990 and 2010. In this new publication, available on Professor Turner’s website, http://www.csun.edu/~hfgeg005/eturner/books.html, there are several summary maps and basic ethnic population tables plus distribution and 1990–2010 change maps for each ethnic group. We envision this online book as a resource for teachers, students, ethnic community leaders, and the public who are interested in ethnic patterns and trends in Southern California, both larger well-publicized groups and smaller ones typically not known at all by outsiders. In addition, the website contains digital copies of our earlier books. There are numerous interesting findings, some of which we present in our talk.

Jasmine Arpagian, arpagian@rohan.sdsu.edu, San Diego State University. Serving Only Sour Cream: Roma Youth Redressing Social Inequalities. Earlier this year, in Iasi, Romania, unwanted Roma pupils were tossed back and forth between rosters of two schools. Principals preferred “sour cream” or white students instead of Roma. Positive, interethnic interactions between Roma and non-Roma youth [End Page 298] are limited due to social and spatial segregation, traditional upbringing, and lack of communication tools. Lefebvre’s right to the city, Marshall’s three-pronged approach to citizenship, and Arendt’s distinction between a subject’s I/me and who/what will serve as this paper’s theoretical underpinning. I will discuss ethnic diversity, discrimination, and inequalities experienced by Roma in Iasi and Craiova. The state attempted to rectify these social sufferings, specifically with the Ministry of Education’s 2007 order mandating school desegregation. However, considering this order’s futility and some negative side-effects of the state’s affirmative action policies, my central argument is that Romanian Roma youth try to claim the right to their diverse cities through civil and political engagement.

Daniel Arreola, daniel.arreola@asu.edu, Arizona State University. The Mexican Restaurant in America, A Prospectus. The Mexican restaurant is a form of ethnic food dining found across the United States in large cities and small towns. It is at once an expression of popular cultural consumption and a business enterprise historically engaged by families of Mexican ancestry. This project explores how Mexican restaurants came to be a part of the American dining experience. The presentation summarizes the restaurant as a form of material culture, a venue of cross-cultural contact, an ethnic enterprise, and a culinary business of surprising regional variation.

Lourdes Johanna Avelar Portillo, ljavelar@gmail.com, California State Long Beach. In Every Cantaro of Water: Women’s Water Access Struggles in Rural El Salvador. Latin America is one of the richest regions in the world in rainfall and freshwater resources. Despite this, large populations in this region struggle to gain safe access to safe drinking-water supply and sanitation services. The objectives of this...

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